Because defects may occur when manufacturing a flash memory device, it is often preferred to test the memory during production in order to determine if the memory is “healthy” enough for its intended operation. Previous approaches for estimating a flash memory's health are implemented in the fabrication facility as part of the testing (qual) phase and are not performed during the memory's lifetime due to complexity of the testing procedure. Specifically, during the health test, reference data is written to multiple e-blocks (i.e., an error correction code (ECC) codeword) in the flash memory. The e-blocks are then read from memory, the data is decoded, and the error statistics are gathered from all of the data. Using the error statistics data, the “health” condition of the memory is estimated, and the memory is qualified or disqualified accordingly. These previous approaches for evaluating memory health involve storing large amounts of data, so health analysis is limited to production and testing times and could not be performed during normal operation of the memory device during its routine operation.